Meandering thoughts of the Knight household, mostly work and technology related guff.

Monday, February 28, 2011

Running chkdsk on a Drive Allocated to Windows Server Backup

Occasionally I see Windows Server Backup throw odd errors pointing to problems with the disk allocated to Windows Server Backup, such as the bizarre “There is not enough space on the disk” – bizarre in that Windows Server Backup is supposed to automagically manage the disk space allocation and tidy up.

The normal course of action would be to run chkdsk /f on the drive, but the drive doesn’t have a drive letter allocated to it. Nor are you supposed to allocate a drive letter to it. The solution? Use the Volume GUID.

To find the Volume GUID, type in the following at an elevated Command Prompt:

mountvol

This will return the command syntax for the mountvol command, followed by the existing volumes and their mount points. We’re interested in the Volume GUID immediately above this line:

*** NO MOUNT POINTS ***

It will look something like this:

\\?\Volume{12345678-1234-5678-9abc-123456789abc}\

We now take this Volume GUID minus the trailing slash and feed it to chkdsk, like this:

chkdsk /f \\?\Volume{12345678-1234-5678-9abc-123456789abc}

This will then allow chkdsk to perform a consistency check and fix of the drive allocated to Windows Server Backup without needing to allocate a drive letter.

@Woody sounds like the drive hasn't been formatted. If it doesn't have any data on it, then you can open Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Storage > Disk Management, create a partition on the drive and format it as NTFS.

I am having this same issue with the Windows Server Backup. The backups started to fail with error "The system cannot find the file specified". When I try to run chkdsk on this volume it states "The volume is raw" but I never encrypted it. It's definitely NTFS... Did the partition corrupt or something? I feel like I have a problem with Windows Server Backup every day.

So, in Windows Server 2012 Essentials, there's a facility to take care of this from the Dashboard. Go to Storage | Drives, then select the Backup drive. From the properties, you can select the "Check and Repair a hard drive" utility. It works, but it's irritating that MS stuck it in the dashboard - chkdsk from disk manager doesn't work.